Sacre Coeur

The first outing Jeff and I went on together (on Monday, January 16th) once we were reunited post-Nottingham was to Sacre Coeur Basilica, which is atop Montmartre, the highest ground in Paris. It's a relatively young building, finished in 1914. We were mostly interested in the view from atop la butte Montmartre. We took a winding walk through narrow streets to the base of the hill, then climbed 270 stairs up, up, up to the top. Jeff and I didn't dawdle on the stair-climbing. It was full-steam ahead the whole time and I arrived up top panting and...steaming under all of my layers.

Walking through the streets with the big hill up ahead. 

 It was a tad hazy for a crisp clear view of the city, but we were still satisfied.

 We enjoyed a stroll through the narrow side streets of Montmartre. Walking away from Sacre Coeur there was a dropoff down the hill's edge at the end of the street, and walking towards Sacre Coeur we could see the giant building towering above the little alleys. Christmas decorations were half-up, half-taken-down all over town.

I didn't know it at the time, but this building (across the street from Sacre Coeur) is the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, built in 1133. Now that's an old building--I was wondering why I liked it so much while we were walking past. The light was also slanting on the walls in a somewhat artistic way.

Amber looked at these pictures while I was loading them and said "iss a poe-boww!" She thought it was a temple. 

We climbed the Montmartre stairs again the next night to watch the sun set over Paris. Again, it was a tad hazy, but the haze turned the sun into a flaming red ball floating near the Eiffel Tower. While we waited for complete darkness to fall, we went inside Sacre Coeur to look around. We had never been inside before. Last time we were in Paris, we climbed 700 steps up the Eiffel Tower and 387 steps up to the Notre Dame towers all in one day, so we were done with stairs when it came to Sacre Coeur and didn't even climb all the way up the hill on the outside stairs. This time around, we didn't climb any towers, just enjoyed the sites from solid ground. And somehow I still got sore from stair-climbing! I must not be 21, fresh off of a collegiate cross country season anymore.

Anyways, the inside of Sacre Coeur was rather plain, although I saw organ pipes and heard the echoes of lowered voices and WISHED someone would play the organ--the acoustics are probably phenomenal there! While we sat in a pew, warming up and waiting for full night, some nuns in white with black head coverings went up front and started to sing. One of them played some kind of harp-ish instrument and the sisters sang beautifully in French. The only flaw in the performance was that they were wired with a not-superb sound system with speakers placed all over the giant room, so the echoes were all out of sync with each other since the sound was coming from so many sources. I wanted them to turn off the speakers and see how it sounded that way! In any case, it was still lovely and we eventually slipped out the door into the damp frigid Paris night.

 The good ole Tour Eiffel, lit up and search-lighting. I thought it was nifty how the search light managed to light up the tree branches in the foreground--those trees were growing next to Sacre Couer, miles from the Eiffel Tower! (we zoomed in with the camera for this picture)

Some of the streets down there were lit bright as day--it was almost painful once we came down from the velvety dark hill. Too bad they were all lame souvenir shops--the shop owners seemed to think that the brighter their lights, the better their business would be. We walked in the middle of the road to avoid them.

Backlit nighttime selfies are a challenge.

 We rode the funicular down the hill to save our tired legs. It felt a little like cheating, but weeeeee!